Methodology

We'll be gathering millions of pieces of data from social media (primarily Twitter)
and processing it using a number of filters, bespoke algorithms and other predictive
analytics techniques to convert metrics like message volume and sentiment into a
predicted national vote share for each of the major UK-wide political parties.

At the end of each day of the campaign, until the election on 8 June 2017,
we'll process the data and publish a snapshot and multi-day average to see how
each day's events have affected our predictions.

Charts

Daily snapshot

This chart shows where the UK's national political parties stand after each day of
the election campaign based on that day's data. Expect significant swings as
people react to breaking news stories, policy announcements and other events.

Multi-day average

This chart uses a rolling 4 day window to iron out temporary spikes caused by
news and other events, aiming to make it easier to spot trends as we move towards
election day.

Significant events

Noteworthy news stories that may have significantly affected opinion during the election campaign:

Date

Events

Result: within margin of error for all parties except Lib Dems

Our final daily snapshot before the election, based on analysis of around 1.5 million social
media messages on 7 June 2017, was exactly right for Labour and UKIP, and within the margin
of error (2%) for the Conservatives and Greens, although it slightly underestimated the
Liberal Democrats:

Conclusion

We're genuinely excited about how close our final daily snapshot was to the actual general election
result, and will be running additional analysis on the data leading up to it to see if
we can work out whether there was a genuine last minute swing to Labour or if there were other
factors at play. For example, if an underestimation of just how negative people can be on social
media lead to our algorithms overstating the Conservative position.

It's impossible to know at this stage whether the accuracy of the final daily snapshot is something
that could be repeated, but we'll definitely be running this experiment again in the future to
find out!